Poetry Kaleidoscope: Guide to Poetry

Christian Poetry

Christian poetry is any
poetry
that contains
Christian teachings, themes, or references. The influence of
Christianity on poetry has been great in any area that Christianity has
taken hold. Christian poems often directly reference the
Bible,
while others provide
allegory.

Overview of Christian poetry

Poetic forms have been used by Christians since the recorded history of the
faith begins. The earliest Christian poetry, in fact, appears in the
New Testament. Canticles such as the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, which appear
in the Gospel of Luke, take the
Biblical poetry of the
psalms of the Hebrew Bible as their models. Many Biblical scholars also believe
that St Paul of Tarsus quotes bits of early Christian hymns in his epistles.
Passages such as Philippians 2:5-11:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant,
and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient
unto death, even the death of the cross.
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is
above every name:
That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and
things in earth, and things under the earth;
And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory
of God the Father. (KJV)

are thought by many Biblical scholars to represent early Christian hymns that
were being quoted by the
Apostle.

Within the world of
classical antiquity, Christian poets often struggled with their relationship
to the existing traditions of
Greek and
Latin
poetry, which were of course heavily influenced by
paganism. Paul quotes the pagan poets Aratus and Epimenides in Acts 17:28: "For
in him we live, and move, and have our being: as certain also of your own poets
have said, 'For we are also his offspring.'" Some early Christian poets such as
Ausonius continued to include allusions to pagan deities and standard classical
figures and allusions continued to appear in his verse. Other Christian poems of
the late Roman Empire, such as the Psychomachia of Prudentius, cut back on
allusions to Greek mythology, but continue the use of inherited classical forms.

Other early Christian poets were more innovative. The hymnodist
Venantius Fortunatus wrote a number of important poems that are still used in
the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Vexilla Regis ("The Royal Standard") and Pange, lingua, gloriosi
proelium certaminis ("Sing, O my tongue, of the glorious struggle"). From a
literary and linguistic viewpoint, these hymns represent important innovations;
they turn away from Greek
prosody and instead seem to have been based on the rhythmic marching songs
of Roman armies.

A related issue concerned the literary quality of Christian
scripture. Most of the New Testament was written in a sub-literary variety of
koinź Greek, as was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.
The Old Latin Bible added further solecisms to those found in its source texts.
None of the Christian scriptures were written to suit the tastes of those who
were educated in classical Greek or Latin rhetoric. Educated pagans, seeing the
sub-literary quality of the Christian scriptures, posed a problem for Christian
apologists: why did the Holy Ghost write so badly? Some Christian writers such
as Tertullian flatly rejected classical standards of rhetoric; "what has Athens
to do with Jerusalem?" he asked.

The cultural prestige of classical literary standards was not so easy for
other Christians to overcome. St
Jerome, trained in the classical Latin rhetoric of Cicero, observed that dismay
over the quality of existing Latin Bible translations was a major motivating
factor that induced him to produce the Vulgate, which went on to become the
standard Latin Bible, and remains the official Bible translation of the Roman
Catholic Church. A fuller appreciation of the formal literary virtues of
Biblical poetry remained unavailable for European Christians until 1754, when
Robert Lowth (later made a bishop in the Church of England), kinder to the
Hebrew language than his own, published Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi
Hebraeorum, which identified parallelism as the chief rhetorical device within Hebrew poetry.

In many European
vernacular literatures, Christian poetry appears among the earliest monuments of
those literatures, and Biblical paraphrases in verse often precede Bible
translations. In Old English poetry, the Dream of the Rood, a meditation on
Christ's crucifixion which adapts Germanic heroic imagery and applies it to
Jesus, is one of the earliest extant monuments of Old English literature. Dante
Alighieri's The Divine Comedy represents one of the earliest monuments of
Italian vernacular literature. Much Old Irish poetry was the work of Irish monks and is on
religious themes. This story is repeated in most European languages.